1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an apparatus, a method and a computer program product for processing documents.
2. Description of the Related Art
In companies, documents containing regulations and the like have commonly been computerized and managed on servers, or the like.
The regulation documents in companies are the basis for business activities. Therefore, when changes in business processes resulting from daily company activities or public movements, or changes of organization names occur, the corresponding regulation documents need to be appropriately modified or updated to properly reflect these changes.
However, practical regulation documents themselves are usually described in a specific file format or the like, and stored flatly in a database in the company. Even when the regulation documents are classified, only a simple classification is performed in many cases such that the regulation documents are partially related to an organizational hierarchy.
A manager that manages the regulation documents creates new regulation documents, and then continuously revises or updates the documents. The manager needs to perform the revision or update according to the business activities. It is quite difficult in the nature of the businesses that are daily revised to predict parts that will be modified in the further, and to perform modulation thereof by separating these parts as reusable parts from other parts, or the like, at the creation of the regulation documents, to facilitate the revision or update.
That is, parts to be revised and parts that do not need to be revised are mixed in the regulation documents. Accordingly, when the business processes or the organization names are to be changed, finding parts that are affected by the change in a large quantity of the regulation documents imposes a great workload.
A technique described in JP-A 2003-108598 (KOKAI) enables to, when data of documents such as laws are registered in a document management database, simultaneously store relevant acts, points to be checked, arguments, and the like, in the database. In this way, when a law is displayed for example on a viewing screen, relevant information is simultaneously presented, so that the relevant information can be easily referred to. By applying this technique, parts that are affected by the change can be found.
However, the technique as described in JP-A 2003-108598 (KOKAI) needs to previously register the relevant information in the database at the registration of the document. Therefore, it is difficult to identify document data or relevant document data to be modified by tracing link identification information or a search key that is not previously expected, when the businesses or organization names are changed after the registration.